I don't believe I ever experienced this with Thunderbird while running it on windows 7. Now on Win 10 I've noticed an issue with background processes of Thunderbird loading. Often, after closing Thunderbird the background processes remain open and don't close. Sometimes when this happens and then I try to open Thunderbird again (which isn't often because it's almost always just open), running the program will add a new background process but it won't open the application.

When this occurs the only solution is to manually end each process before I am able to open the application again. When it occurs there are at least two background processes left running sometimes more.

A similar issue occurs with Firefox as well. I cannot open the application until I've closed the background processes left open from a previous run.

This problem appears to be preventing Thunderbird from updating. I have it set to update automatically.

I open the About page under Help. The window pops up and says version 53.02b. Then is says "applying update" and then a button appears that says "restart to update". So I click the button to restart. Thunderbird closes and doesn't reopen even if I run the application. If I look at the processes there are several TB background processes still running after clicking the restart button in TB. So I end those tasks and open Thunderbird. Version has not been updated and process begins again when I return to the About page.

Is there a way to install the update manually? I'm looking to see if I can figure out another way to update.

With TB open there are no background processes for TB. When I click the restart to update button TB closes, a background process opens up and then I noticed that the TB Updater service appears briefly in the processes and then closes. The background process remains open. TB doesn't restart. The only way to restart is to close the background process first, then open TB. When TB opens it has not been updated.

If you are using 53.02b it means that you have chosen the Beta channel rather than the release channel and that's why TB is not updating your installation. Any particular reason you have chosen to work with the pre-release (beta) versions of the program?

Not sure what not updating because they are on the Beta channel means. There were 54 and 55 betas.

I just installed 53.0b2 in my test user account, did a Help > About Thunderbird and it updated me to 56.0b1 without any problem on Linux. I can test on Windows tomorrow, or hyjinx can download the full installer from the link I posted above.